- This Week's Books
• MR. GEOFFREY KEYNES and the Nonesuch Press are to be congratulated once more on their splendid Pencil Drawings of William Blake (35s.). Here is some of the best of Blake, and it is indeed amazing that his pencil drawings and drafts for engravings have been considered of less importance -than his more finished work. After all, we do not come to ,Blake for technique (although that also is sometimes of a (high order) but for imagination ; and it is in the first flush of -creation that we here catch the master, at work. What .amazing autumn evenings those must have been with Varley
in 1819, when the illustrious dead posed for the two artists, in visions! It was then that Blake drew "The Man who built the Pyramids" with his blubber lips and dog's teeth, and by far the best conception of Socrates that the world will ever have, and Caractacus, looking like Hindenburg, and the half-devilish, half-Buddhist "man who instructed Mr. Blake" and the strange, haunting "Saul, King of Israel, somewhat influenced by the evil spirit." What a gorgeous book—what excellent reproductions and worthy text !
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